


To the Stars and Back

by Donthavesexwithsam



Category: Wolf 359 - Fandom
Genre: F/M, I blame sinchat, sorry for the cliche title
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 22:07:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6212026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donthavesexwithsam/pseuds/Donthavesexwithsam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My last mystery guy theory before we get to Securité... DUN DUN DUN; Mister Koudelka. Because YOLO why not. Got this idea from Mariusperkins</p>
            </blockquote>





	To the Stars and Back

“Well, well, well,” A tall, blonde man hovered into the bridge of the shuttle. “Communications Officer Doug Eiffel! You’re a long way from Wolf 359, aren’t you?”

Eiffel backed away, against the comms panel. “What? Who’re…” His breath halted in his throat. Raggedly, he tried to breathe in, but his body was just, too tired. “How do you know?” He choked.

“Easy, easy!” The man moved towards Eiffel, pressing one warm, strong hand against his ice-cold chest. Eiffel wished he could sink into that hand, absorb its warmth. He shivered. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but don’t worry. Everything is going to be o-kay. We’re here to take you home.”

“Earth or the Hephaestus?” Eiffel said weakly, with a smile on his lips.

“Hephaestus first,” The man replied, needing no explanation whatsoever. It should worry Doug, that the man knew so much, but he didn’t care. And drat. He didn’t even care that he didn’t care. “We got to stop there along the way, and then we head towards Earth.”

“Why?” Doug asked. “How do you know so much?”

The man hauled Doug onto his shoulder, wrapping his arms around his torso.

“ _ Dieu _ , I can feel your ribs man,” the man mumbled.

“I haven't eaten a lot the past while.” Doug joked. He looked at the man’s face, that was really close to his. His breath smelled of mint. “Toothpaste,” Doug muttered, before he even noticed he was saying something.

“Yeah?” the man laughed. “I try to keep up with hygiene stuff and so on.”

“Didn't have much tools to,” Doug mumbled.

“Don't worry about it,” the man shook his head. He strapped Doug down on a bed.

“Flo!” He called out. “Veux installer un goutte à goutte?”

“ _ Oui, David! _ ” A tall woman, her impractically long hair in a super complicated braid pinned to her head, entered Doug’s vision. “Hello!” She said to Doug with a heavy, but not unpleasant, french accent. “I’m Doctor Florence Devouard, but you can call my Flo if you like. Everyone does that.”

While she babbled nonsense in his general, she’d already started the IV. Now that the needle was in, Doug realized that she’d been distracting him. He wasn’t really used to good, as-painless-as-possible healthcare anymore.

“I’m going to give you some salt and minerals,” Flo explained, “Along with some fluids to hydrate you. You should try to close your eyes for a bit.”

“What are you going to do?” Doug asked.

“We’re going to go to Wolf 359,” David said, and there was honest-to-God fire and anger in his eyes. “Because it’s goddamn time.”

“Watch your language!” Flo elbowed him.

Doug hoped he was in good hands, because he couldn’t physically hold his eyes open anymore. Flo tucked him in tightly, to make sure his blanket would float away, and then left him alone.

Roughly sixteen hours later, Eiffel opened his eyes again, scared, confused, and alone. “Hera?” He called. He tried to get up, but his elbows doubled, even when weightless, they were too weak to push him off. “Hera!”

The room didn’t look like any room on the Hephaestus, but Eiffel hadn’t been to  _ all _ the rooms on the Hephaestus. The station was too large and too unwilling to let itself be fully explored. Eiffel had tried.

“Hera?!” He called out again. He knew it was irrational. But if he wished deeply enough…

The door opened and the French lady came back in, “Hello Doug!” She said. Her voice sounded like a song. “Remember me?”

“Doctor Flo,” Eiffel mumbled.

“Oui,” Flo smiled. “Good.” She pushed him back onto the bed and started fumbling with his IV.

“How did you find me?” Eiffel asked. “Who are you?”

“We told you when we found you, remember?” Flo said. “I am Doctor Florence, and with me is my friend, David. We came to get you all from the Hephaestus.”

“Then why pick me up?” Eiffel asked. His words came out raw. “I was on a trajectory away from the Hephaestus, away from Earth.”

“You weren’t,” David said. He was floating in the doorway, arms crossed. “You were on a trajectory to Earth. Well,  _ roughly _ . You were still going to miss Earth by a long shot, but yeah, your calculations were way off.”

“Oh.” Eiffel uttered. “I… Okay.”

“Don’t worry.” David smiled. “We’re hauling ass to the Hephaestus, pack up shop and get you all home safe.”

“Why are you saving us?” Eiffel asked. “How do you even know we were out there.”

David and Flo exchanged looks.

“Maybe Renée told you about me,” David said.

Eiffel frowned when David said ‘Renée’, it still took him a moment or two to realize ‘Renée’ was Minkowski.

“Commander Minkowski?” He asked. “I don’t think so. She wasn’t much about discussing her personal life.”

David nodded. “Sounds like Renée all right.” He paused. “I’m her husband.”

Eiffel’s mouth opened and closed, in some sort of an ecstatic grin. “So you’re  _ mister Koudelka _ !”

David smiled confusedly. “She told you my last name, but not my first?”

“It was kind of a weird conversation.” Eiffel shrugged. “But how did you end up in deep space? Just to save your lady?”

David laughed. “That’s actually a funny story.”

“No it’s not,” Flo grinned. “It’s a really sad story.”

She was still changing the various bandages.

“We used to say, to the stars and back,” David sighed. “That’s how much we loved each other. And I guess that it’s true now. After the mission ended, Goddard Futuristics contacted me, they told me that the shuttle that was supposed to bring you all back had exploded, and that there were no survivors.”

When telling this, David’s eyes teared up, reliving those devastating moments. “I was heartbroken. Until I received an email. When the mission was still active, they would send me emails with radio transmissions Renée send me, once or twice a month. At first I thought it was her last transmission, before she boarded the shuttle, but the day didn’t make sense. She said ‘Day seven-hundred-forty-five’, but the rotation was seven-hundred-and-thirty days. So I knew she was still alive, still out there. I tried pulling some strings, blowing a couple of whistles, but I was warned to keep quiet. I was warned, very, uhm, convincingly. After that I was running out of options.”

“And then he met me,” Flo smiled.

“Yeah,” David grinned. “My sugar-mommy.”

“Yuck,” Flo shook her head. “I have all kinds weird associations with that word.”

“It wasn’t entirely charity, okay.” David nodded. “Flo wanted to go into deep space, both for personal reasons and to test a theory she discussed in her thesis, but she didn’t have the connections to set her up. I had the connections, but I didn’t have the money.”

“I’m really rich.” Flo shrugged. “Like.  _ Really _ rich.”

“So I got us set-up, Flo paid the bills, and we set out to Wolf 359.”

“We were almost there,” Flo continued, “Until we picked up strands of your mayday and diverted from course.”

“And I’m glad we did,” David said.

They set course to Wolf 359 again, a little over twenty days out of their reach. Flo kept tending to Doug, and even though he was a little wary at first, he was comfortable with letting her do more and more to help him, like give him antibiotics or come close to him with a scalpel to cut loose his stitches.

After a week or so, he was even allowed to leave the bed.

“Your body regenerates quickly,” Flo told him. “You are a strong man.”

“I prefer stubborn,” Doug grinned.

But she was right. It wasn’t much, but his nails were already growing back, weakly (Flo gave him extra calcium to help speed up the growth) and even his hair was showing signs of hope. A day or four before they were scheduled to arrive at the Hephaestus, Doug wandered into the bridge, and asked a question that had been haunting him for a week now.

“On board the Hephaestus, we have a mother program,” He said.

“Hera, right?” David said, distractedly. “Renée told her about me in the logs she send back to Canaveral.

Eiffel nodded. “Yeah. So… Is she, able to come along?”

“I’m not one-hundred percent positive,” David admitted, “But I do think so. They had to get her  _ up  _ there, and we took memory banks we think can contain her personality core, but I can't promise anything.”

The worried look on Eiffel’s face said more than enough.

“Don’t worry about it,” David ensured him. “There’s like a ten percent chance of something going wrong.”

“Still ten percent too much,” Eiffel sighed.

“Even given we only have a sixty-four percent chance of making it back to Earth ourselves?” David grinned. “It’s going to be okay, Doug. Please. You’ve had enough to worry about these past years. Let us take care of you now.”

A little worried still, Eiffel nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I’m going to… get some sleep.

Since he had been rescued from the USS Unending Nightmare, he’d been getting around sixteen hours of sleep a day, which was even a lot more than he slept when he was still on the Hephaestus. Flo said it was normal, but Eiffel didn’t like it anymore. He felt tired constantly, even after just waking up, and sleep meant nightmares.

He’d never been haunted by nightmares. He’d had the occasional one about death spiders or Hilbert chasing him with various scary looking pieces of medical equipment, but he was never followed by them, the way Lovelace would sometimes scream in the middle of the night, the way Eiffel would see Minkowski at the breakfast table and the bags under her eyes would tell her story for her.

But now he would dream. He’d dream about his nails bleeding, his hair and skin crumbling from his muscles and bones. He would dream about the ice in his lungs, the fiery pain in his throat as he coughed up as much frostburn as he possibly could, but it kept coming. He kept coughing, and coughing, and more ice would come out. And the moment he felt he caught his breath, he would be forced back into cryo again.

And then Hera was there. She was, without a doubt, the most painful part of his nightmares. But he longed for her the way you long for a fire. The flames might sting, but at least they keep you warm. He would call out for her, and she would talk to him.

“ _ Officer Eiffel? - Doug! Can you hear me? _ ” The roles reversed.

“I won’t go,” He told her one night. “If you can’t come with us, I won’t leave you up there.”

“ _ You have no choice _ ,” Hera replied. “ _ You have to leave me _ .”

“No,” He said, stubbornly. “I won’t. They can’t make me.”

“ _ You don’t understand, Eiffel _ ,” There was fire in her voice. “ _ One day you’re going to run out of resources. And then you’ll still have to leave. I’m not going to die anytime soon. _ ”

And then he woke up, bathing in sweat.

They arrived on schedule. Eiffel could see Wolf 359 closing in from the bridge. He’d recognize that traitorous smurf anywhere.

“This is the ERRV Pirithous calling for the USS Hephaestus Station.” David called through their radio.

It took a few minutes, but then; “ _ ERRV Pirithous? This is Commanding Officer Renée Minkowski from the USS Hephaestus. Please state your intention. _ ”

“We’ve come to extract you, your crew and the AI mother program you have on board.” David said.

There was a stunned silence.

“ _ We’ve- I’ve opened the docking bay. Please proceed. _ ”

David maneuvered the ship into the docking bay, starting the coupling process.

“Are you okay?” Flo asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

He shook his head. Then he nodded. “Renée,” he whispered. “It’s really her.”

There was a chime, as Hera patched into their intercom system.

“ _ You have successfully docked. Please stand by for pressure exchange. _ ”

“Hera?” Doug asked, but she couldn’t hear him. She could only broadcast here. The three travelling companions rushed to their airlock as it opened.

It was a majestic sight, Doug thought, as he saw his Commander standing there, Lovelace half a step behind him, armed to the teeth. The angry, tired look on her face disappeared in seconds as she realized who were in front of her.

“ _ Eiffel _ ?” Hera asked over the intercom system. “ _ Is it? Really? _ ”

Eiffel laughed out loud, a genuine, deep laugh from the warmth of his chest. “Yeah, baby, it’s me! I thought I’d never hear your voice again!”

“ _ Eiffel! _ ” Hera laughed too. “ _ I missed you! _ ”

Minkowski, however, lowered her gun slowly, her mouth agape, as she moved forward, reaching out to her husband.

David took her hand, and it was as if a spell was broken. She lunged towards him, sinking into his arms. “David,” She said, her voice was weary and tired, but a thousand years younger than Doug had ever heard her. “Why are you here? How did you get here?"

“To the stars and back, remember?” He smiled. “Jusqu'aux étoiles et de retour.”


End file.
